Chevrolet Volt Price Tag Still Looks Like $40K

One of the big questions about the Chevrolet Volt is what it will cost. CEO Ed Whitacre generated a bit of excitement yesterday when he suggested the car would be priced in the low 30s. Turns out that’s after the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs. And that puts the price tag back in the $40,000 ballpark, which is where most people have long thought it would be.

General Motors hasn’t said what the Chevrolet Volt will cost when it rolls off an assembly line at the end of the year, but it is widely believed to be trying to keep it under 40 grand. Whitacre got some people in a lather when he told Lyle Dennis of GM-Volt.com the car “is going to sell in the low 30s” and “we’ll get a margin on that.” What Whitacre didn’t say whether that was before or after the federal EV tax credit.

Turns out it’s after the tax break.

“Although Chevrolet has not officially announced final Volt pricing, a price in the low 30’s after a $7,500 tax credit is in the range of possibilities,” Chevrolet spokesman David Darovitz told us. “Stay tuned. We’ll announce final pricing later this year.”

The Volt is a range-extended electric vehicle that uses a 16 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery. When the battery goes dead — GM says the range is 40 miles — a small gasoline engine drives a generator that keeps the electricity flowing. It’s cool technology, but the price tag makes it a failure, according to IEEE Spectrum. Although the magazine calls the Volt, “bold, cool, and technically feasible,” it says the car ultimately will fail.

“At a projected price of $40 000, cosmic success just isn’t going to happen,” Philip E. Ross writes in the magazine, which put the car in the “loser” column of its latest technology Winners & Losers list.

Whitacre doesn’t agree.

“We’re not in business to lose money,” he told GM-Volt.com. “We did enough of that already.”